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The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools Shape Our Understanding

Article in Canadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l éducation · June 1998

DOI: 10.2307/1585992 · Source: OAI

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 Education’s three old ideas, and a better idea.

Kieran Egan
Faculty of Education
Simon Fraser University
Burnaby, B.C. Canada V5A 1S6

(Word count: approx. 5,050)

Introduction

Something new, irritating, and inexplicable happened to most of the citizens of Europe in the

sixteenth century. Prices for staples like food and clothing began to rise. The average citizen blamed the

clothes sellers for greedily raising their prices. The clothes sellers protested that they were no more greedy

than usual, and that the problem was due to the greed of the cloth merchants who were demanding more for

their cloth. The merchants blamed the weavers, who blamed the wool merchants, who blamed the sheep

farmers. The sheep farmers protested their blamelessness and said they had to raise their prices to be able to

afford the increasingly expensive clothes.

So who was to blame? Someone was clearly ripping off the good citizenry, but no group seemed

obviously richer, nor without the alibi that they were just responding to rising costs themselves. Where was

the mysterious source of this irritant? Despite the polemics, finger-pointing, moral attitudinizing, and even

earnest inquiries, it wasn’t till near the end of the century that Jean Bodin(1530-1596) worked out that none

of the usually blamed suspects was responsible. Rather, the price-rise was caused by the use in the royal

mints of Europe of the gold and silver plundered from Central and South America. An increase in the money

supply caused what we call inflation.

We seem to have a somewhat analogous situation today with regard to our schools. Since mass

schooling was invented in the late nineteenth century, we have faced the new, irritating, and apparently

inexplicable fact that, despite massive expenditures of public money and huge commitments of time by

expensive professionals, the general educational achievement of schools is pretty derisory. The life-

transforming and life-enhancing joys of education, hitherto available only to the very rich, were to be made

available to everyone. But this boon has somehow been realized as a dreary, seedy, and largely boring

enterprise that opens the promised riches of education to very few and leaves the majority suspicious of,

alienated from, and even hostile to most forms of intellectual life. The promise that schools would at least
produce a trained work-force able flexibly to adapt to the changing needs of an industrial and post-industrial

economy is realized only in part and generally inadequately. Why is it so hard to educate people?

Reading about how to fix our schools is disturbingly reminiscent of sixteenth century debates about

the cause of the price rise and how to stop it. Open any paper or magazine that discusses education, and you

find the polemics, finger-pointing, moral attitudinizing, and even earnest inquiries aimed at the usual

suspects: the lack of market incentives in schools, inadequately educated teachers, the genetic inability of

85% of the population to benefit from instruction in more than basic skills and literacy, drugs, the inequities

of capitalist societies, the breakdown of the traditional family and its values, an irrelevant academic

curriculum, a trivial curriculum filled only with the immediately “relevant”, and so on.

I want to suggest that the usual suspects are innocent, or at least innocent of this particular crime, and

that the cause of our modern irritant lies elsewhere, in a hitherto unsuspected place.

When schools were set up in the late nineteenth century, three idea determined how they were

organized and what their objectives were. The reason schools have never worked very well for most people is

because these three ideas are mutually incompatible. Each one of them manages to find enough elbow room

in our educational systems mainly to undermine the effectiveness of the other two.

The three ideas

I know that locating the practical problem of education in the realm of abstract ideas doesn’t exactly

quicken the pulse. Arguments about the sixteenth century price-rise were at least carried on against a

background of tangible goods, green acres of property, and gold from El Dorado. The educational

equivalents are certainly less tangible, especially to those who have been cheated of them by dysfunctional

schooling. Anyway, let me describe these three ideas, and where they came from. I’m sure they will be

familiar.
 The first educational idea is that we should shape children to the norms, values, and beliefs of the

adult society. In the jargon of textbooks, we call this socialization. We recognize this idea of education when

items in the curriculum are justified on the basis of their future social utility. So reading, writing,

computing, sex-education, consumer-economics, basic common knowledge, and so on, are all justified in

terms of their necessity for someone to get on and be a good citizen today. This is an ancient idea which we

have inherited from oral cultures long ago. When people came to set up the public schools, this idea was still

prominent, and the curriculum was designed to produce good citizens who would embody the dominant

values and beliefs of the social group, and who would be equipped with the skills required by an industrial

society. When politicians fulminate about education, it is very largely this idea of education that governs

their thinking.

The second educational idea was Plato’s. As he chatted with the best and brightest of Athens, he

concluded that well-socialized citizens were more or less contemptible. Their ready acceptance of the

conventional norms and values of the society they grew into seemed to him appalling, as such beliefs, he

showed, were typically a collection of confusions, illusions, stereotypes, prejudices, and dogmas that didn’t

bear much scrutiny. Plato proposed a new idea of education and bequeathed it to us with such compelling

force that we have been unable to shake it off; he conceived of education as the process of seeking the truth

about reality. This requires a lot of hard work over many years to develop a rational, skeptical, and ironic

cast of mind and a commitment to the pursuit of knowledge that requires something akin to sanctity. It has

never proven to be everyone’s cup of tea. But when public schools were organized, their designers too were

unable to shake off Plato’s high-minded idea, and so they instituted a curriculum that aims to teach students

many things that are of no practical value but which are supposed to help them to understand the world. For

Plato, the mind is made up very largely of the knowledge that it accumulates, and accumulating a lot of the

right kind of disciplined knowledge can turn the soul from its easy acceptance of whatever conventional
rubbish happens to be fashionable to an austere and disciplined search for what is true, good, and beautiful.

Hard to knock, but hard to get kids enthusiastic about.

The third idea is largely derived from Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He shared Plato’s contempt for the

conventionally well-educated person. He also shared Plato’s view that early socialization generally taught

children a load of nonsense that was immensely difficult to dislodge once learned. But he thought Plato was

wrong in his view that children’s minds were shaped very largely by the knowledge that they accumulate. He

argued, with a compelling persuasiveness not much less than Plato’s, that the mind has an internal,

spontaneous, natural developmental process through which it grows, and proper education is the process of

furthering its fullest development. He suggested that the mind is like the body in that the particular food

eaten doesn't radically influence the shape of the body; eating lots of broccoli doesn't make us grow to look

like broccoli, so what we learn isn't the vital part of education. Plato's idea was equivalent, Rousseau argued,

to thinking that eating lots of broccoli would make us more broccoli-like. Sensible methodology, similarly,

requires us to make what we teach conform with the nature of students’ learning. So education became for

Rousseau a matter of facilitating the fullest development of a natural psychological process, and thereby

fulfilling as far as possible the potential of each individual student. Clearly a more attractive and hopeful

idea than Plato's; it promises the fulfillment of our educational aims by simply doing what is easiest and

natural. No wonder it has appealed so widely in North America, where it has become the anchoring idea of

"progressivism".

Pretty well all modern conceptions of education, from the most radical to the most conservative, are

compounded from these three ideas. No-one holds one of them to the exclusion of the other two, of course;

it's a matter of the proportions in which they are mixed. So the more radical conceptions tend to combine a

large amount of Rousseau with a small dose of socializing and go very sparingly with the Plato. The

conservative tends to stir in a good measure of Plato, a healthy dose of socializing, and go light on the
Rousseau. Your average politician throws in a very large dose of socializing, is very sparing of Rousseau, and

sprinkles in just a little bit of Plato.

The three ideas are familiar still in all disputes about education. I think one might fairly describe

educational arguments as nothing other than an assertion about the precedence these ideas should take in

determining educational programs. In recent battles over the Social Studies curriculum in various States, for

example, we can recognize those who argue that children should continue to follow the sequence of study

from self and families to communities to interactions among communities, etc. as preferring more Rousseau

and socializing over Plato. Those who argue for charter schools where strong academic programs aimed at

“excellence” will predominate are expressing a preference for more Plato and socializing and a bit less

Rousseau. I’m sure you would find it easy to classify most educational positions in these terms. My main

point, however, is that these three ideas, that have given shape to our schools from their nineteenth century

beginnings, are mutually incompatible.

Incompatibilities

It has been assumed that these three ideas, whether recognized in the form sketched here or not, are

necessary constituents of any sensible conception of education. Everyone assumes that the school should try

to socialize children adequately, and should achieve for each student academic achievements commensurate

with their abilities, and should strive to ensure that each student’s individual potential should be developed

as fully as possible. These have been taken as simply the goals of education, and while occasionally there

may be tensions among these different goals, the aim for the good administrator is to ensure a sound balance

among them, and to ensure that none is sacrificed to the exclusive achievement of another–we don’t want to

emphasize academic achievement, for example, at the expense of the development of shared democratic

values, as Dewey feared might happen, or we don’t want to emphasize socialization to the point of

encouraging unreflective conformity, or we don’t want to allow so much emphasis on developing students’
individual potential that schools fail to support basic common understandings. In fact the three ideas can

seem like the wise balances built into the constitution, each keeping the potential abuses of the others in

check.

Let me try to indicate why I think that incompatibility is precisely the right term for the relationship

among our three great educational ideas.

Socialization and Plato:

The homogenizing aim of socialization, which is to reproduce in each student a particular set of

beliefs, conventions, norms of behavior, and values is necessarily at odds with a process that aims to show

the hollowness and inadequacy of those beliefs, conventions, values, and so on.

Plato promises that the reward for the hard work of his program is pure intellectual delight; hard-won

knowledge is its own reward–an argument confirmed by recent research showing that complex learning

releases endorphins in the brain. But this delight tends to be undercut in schools by the more urgent and

utilitarian needs of socializing, such as future employment-related sorting functions that have led, among

other things, to the frequent use of various kinds of testing.

Imagine that whenever you see a movie, you will, at its end, be tested by a series of questions about it:

What was the color of the villain's car in the first chase scene? What exactly were the words of the telephone

hygienist when the Greek boy fell from the sky? Describe the motivation of the central character's husband;

do you think it was adequate to his decision to turn his ships from the battle? Can you identify two

anachronisms in the Casablanca bar-room scene? etc. etc. An employee of the film company will grade your

answers, and your salary will be radically adjusted each week depending on the results. What do you think

this might do to your delight in movie watching? What was supposed to be a source of pleasure becomes

fraught with anxiety. Well, this is one of the things socialization's requirements do to the Platonic program

in schooling.
 Of course we want the promised benefits of both educational ideas. We want the social harmony and

the psychological stability that successful socialization encourages, but we also want the cultivation of the

mind, the skepticism and dedication to rationality, and the intellectual delights that Plato’s program

encourages. Designing schools to achieve either one is difficult. Our schools today are supposed to

encourage conformity to specific norms and values while encouraging a way of thinking that leads to

skepticism of them at the same time. This is more than difficult.

Rousseau and Plato:

For Rousseau and his modern progressivist followers, the unfolding of the individual's particular

potentials constitutes education. As the development of the body proceeds almost regardless of the

particular food it eats, so the mind will develop almost regardless of the particular knowledge it learns; we

must focus on the developmental process, not the particular knowledge. And for this unfolding to occur

optimally, the student needs time and space to explore. Education, in Plato's view and in that of modern

proponents of the academic idea, is marked rather by students' mastery of increasingly abstract knowledge.

For the Platonists, the only development of educational interest is the accumulation of the particular

knowledge that will bring the mind to clarity of understanding.

The progressivists blame the traditionalists for restricting students' freedom, for imposing a common

curriculum on all, for seeing particular knowledge as privileged and for creating élites, for restricting

students' own inquiries and individual development. The traditionalists blame the progressivists for

perpetuating ignorance and encouraging students' self-indulgence, for producing undisciplined thinkers, for

threatening the intellectual foundations of our culture, and for encouraging students to imagine that their

opinion are as important as hard facts, and confusing the two.

One sees the conflict between these ideas in almost every media account of educational issues, where

the Platonic forces argue for “basics” and a solid academic curriculum, and the Rousseauians argue for

“relevance” and space for students’ exploration and discovery.

 And, of course, sensible people want them both. We could design schools to implement either of

these conceptions of education, but we require our schools to implement both together. But the more we try

to implement one, the more we undermine the other.

Socializing and Rousseau:

When socializing, we derive our educational aim from society’s norms and values; in the Rousseauian

view, we should keep the child from contact with society’s norms and values as long as possible, because they

are “one mass of folly and contradiction”. If we want to let the nature of the child develop and flower as fully

as possible, we will constantly defend her or him against the shaping pressures of society. An aspect of this

conflict is apparent today in attitudes to the general influence of TV on children. TV provides a powerful

shaping to a set of prominent social norms and values, but most parents resist much of this shaping in favor

of activities that seem to them less likely to distort proper or "natural" development.

No-one, of course, is simply on the side of Rousseau against socialization, or vice versa. We all

recognize that any developmental process has to take place within, and be influenced by, a particular society.

Our problem comes about because of the attraction of Rousseau's ideas about a kind of development that

honors something separate from the compromises, the corruptions, and constrictions of spirit that social life

so commonly brings with it. We do not have to share Rousseau's own disgust with society (which returned

him high regard and money) to recognize the attraction of his ideas that there is a natural course to human

development which we should try to keep clear and follow. Though parents do not often put it in Rousseau's

terms, many regret–to a degree that amounts in some cases to heartache–seeing their children off to school

for the first time, knowing that they will be bruised by callousness and insensitivity, made somewhat callous

themselves, seduced by cheap fashions in pleasure, and that their quick minds will be anaesthetized by the

boredom of the classroom.

There doesn't seem room for much compromise between Rousseau and socialization. We can't

sensibly aim to shape a child's development half from nature and half from society. The more we do one, the
more we undermine the other. By trying to compromise, we ensure only that neither is effective. So the

products of our schools are at best a bit lost, a bit alienated, and adrift on a social ocean in which they know

little of whence or whither, and at worst they suffer ignorance, powerlessness, and rage.

A new idea

How else can we think about education? We can think of it as learning to use as well as possible the

intellectual tools developed in our evolution and cultural history.

Humans’ relationship to their tools is very peculiar. While at some simple level tools extend our

senses, in more complex ways they also transform our senses and consequently our very conception of

ourselves. Michael Polanyi indicates something of this odd relationship when he describes how we use

something as simple as a walking stick. Imagine being in a dark cave feeling ahead with the tip of a walking

stick. What one actually feels is the impression of the stick against the hand, but the mind transforms this so

that what we consciously sense is the stones or rock or moss at the tip of the stick. It is as though we flow

into the stick and it becomes integrated into our sensorium.

The mind’s interactions with our symbolic tools is even more complex. Our understanding of the

world and of ourselves has been transformed again and again by our incorporation of various symbolic tools

like language, literacy, and theoretic abstractions.

I think we can reconceive education as the process whereby we acquire as fully as possible the major

symbolic tools invented or discovered in human cultures. Each major set of tools generates for us somewhat

distinctive kinds of understanding. I will briefly sketch these main sets of tools and describe the kinds of

understanding to which they give rise.

The main construction blocks of this new idea of education is “kinds of understanding”, rather than

the more familiar “knowledge” or “psychological development”. What is a kind of understanding? Consider

that at El Quantara railway station in the Suez Canal Zone during the 1920s there were ten lavatories. Three
were for senior officers–one for Europeans, one for Asiatics, and one for Coloreds–three were for non-

commissioned officers, similarly divided by race, three were for other ranks, also divided along racial lines,

and one was for women regardless of race or rank.

One might find this simply a boring fact of no relevance to anything in one’s life. One might store it as

a delightful piece of exotica. One might be outraged by such lavatory arrangements, taking the position of

the other ranks, or be relieved taking the point of view of the officers, or have mixed feelings taking the point

of view of the women. One might find such arrangements objectionable in one way if race is a major

determiner of one’s social consciousness, and another way if class is more prominent. One might consider

such lavatory arrangements part of a progressive historical story reflecting a change from authoritarian to

more democratic social forms. Or one might consider these arrangements as simply one set among a

kaleidoscopic variety of possible forms, none of which is any more “natural” or normal than any other.

That is to say, our understanding today is commonly complex, mixing various ways of making sense of

knowledge and experience. What I want to do is suggest a way of breaking down this complex of

understandings we have available to us, organizing them in the sequence in which they were developed

historically and logically, and using them as the basis for an educational program.

The first tool we have available for understanding the world is our bodies; we see those aspects of the

world that are within the band of radiation our eyes are sensitive to, we perceive a certain scale of things

because of our size, we attend to sounds in a range our auditory organ can hear, and so on. Our first

"Somatic" understanding comes with the mind's expansion into and, as it were, through the body out into

the world. We are an animal that recognizes certain rhythms, especially those connected with language. Our

Somatic understanding is a distinctively human, pre-linguistic "take" on the world; it remains throughout

our lives as basic to all other forms of understanding. In terms of the El Quantara example, it provides a

basic sense of what would be involved physically in using such lavatories, manipulating doors, the likely

smells, the needs that would make them welcome.

 The second main tool we acquire is oral language. Language leads to a distinctive kind of

understanding, which I call Mythic. It makes us see experience in story shapes that orient our emotions to

the events in our lives and our fictions. It makes us break the world up into opposites--good/bad, big/little,

brave/cowardly, secure/anxious--and then elaborate or mediate between the opposites. Our mediations

between discrete opposites, like life/death, human/animal, nature/culture, generate for us ghosts and spirits

(between life and death), monsters and mermaids (between human and animal), and talking animals

(between nature and culture). We prominently use the logic of metaphor, making sense of things in terms of

other things, which is a source of our imaginative lives and creativity. We can use words to generate in our

minds images of what could be or even of what cannot be, which gives us a subjunctive understanding,

unconstrained by brute facts. In terms of our example, Mythic understanding would contribute an affective

orientation to the image we generate of these lavatories.

The third general tool we acquire is literacy; literacy not simply as a coding and decoding procedure,

but tied into the set of uses developed for it in cultural history. Literacy gives us first an intimation of a

reality beyond our stories, gives us the unwelcome understanding that what we believe, hope, fear, and think

about the world are irrelevant to the way the world really is. We begin to access this reality by means of its

extremes–so literate children find information such as that in the Guinness Book of Records immediately

engaging. This kind of understanding I call Romantic, in that the mind tries to transcend reality while

recognizing that it is constrained and vulnerable within it. So we mentally associate with whatever seems

best able to overcome the threats of the world around us; we form romantic associations with heroes, or

great institutions, or whatever is most powerful, tenacious, compassionate, strong, beautiful--whatever, that

is, compensates for what we feel most insecure about in the face of everyday reality. (Tell me your heroes

and I'll tell you what you feel most insecure about.) A Romantic understanding tends to make sense of the

world in human terms, so we are engaged by knowledge if we can see it as the product of some human

emotion or transcendent quality, like genius or compassion or nobility or courage or craziness or any of the
old virtues. In terms of our example, Romantic understanding contributes a sense of the peculiarity of the

arrangements and how perfectly they reflect an exotic imperial system and its prejudices.

The fourth general symbolic tool kit we acquire comes along with learning to use theoretic

abstractions--evident in our use of big, general terms like "society", "evolution", "natural", etc.. These

theoretic forms of thought compel us to recognize that our romantic struggle to transcend reality is futile and

that the mind is trapped within reality as in a spider's web. These theoretic tools deliver a kind of

understanding that comes from grasping in general terms–like ideologies, theologies, moral systems,

metaphysical schemes–the truth about the processes within which we exist. The mind seeks the truth in

general schemes; it wants to know the nature of the historical process--is it tragic, or gradually ameliorative,

or Marxist?; what is the nature and proper organization for society?; what is the truth about human

psychology? I call this kind of understanding Philosophic. It tends to make sense of the world in terms of

processes rather than discrete events. Whereas Romantic understanding focuses on limits and extremes, the

bright bits and pieces of the world, the Philosophic mind sets about charting or making a map of the whole.

It embodies what Wittgenstein called "the craving for generality." In terms of our example, Philosophic

understanding contributes a judgment on those lavatory arrangements in terms of some ideological scheme

or some moral perspective or an appreciation of them as reflecting some social order.

The fifth kind of understanding comes with the development of an extreme reflexiveness of language.

It is the kind of Ironic understanding that results from the recognition that our language can never be

adequate to whatever it seeks to contain or communicate; that the world is made of different stuff from

words, and the latter can never capture the former. Ironic understanding gives us a better sense of where we

end and the world begins, of the ways our symbolic tools tend to embroil us in what we try to understand.

Irony also opens up for us a wider range of jokes, even the cosmic ones. Irony contributes a perspective on

those El Quantara lavatories that includes all the previous kinds of understanding and adds a cool
recognition of the underlying absurdity of the beliefs and commitments that govern such lavatory

arrangements.

Well, that puts it rather briefly. What I want to suggest is that we can reconceive education as an

enterprise aimed at ensuring for each child as full as possible an acquisition of each of these kinds of

understanding. Acquiring them ensures that the sensible aims of education embodied in the old ideas will be

achieved incidentally; a person who gains in significant degree Somatic, Mythic, Romantic, Philosophic, and

Ironic understanding will necessarily have to acquire a lot of knowledge, will have to attain significant

psychological maturity, and will become socially competent. What will not happen is traditional

socialization to conformity, nor the acquisition of particular "élite" knowledge that privileges one against

others, nor the pursuit of some supposedly proper developmental process; and we will leave behind us the

enervating battles among these incompatible aims.

These are not stages we pass through; they are kinds of understanding we accumulate and that

coalesce to some degree. This scheme does not describe a psychological process through which we

spontaneously develop as we grow older; rather, it characterizes forms of thinking evoked in individuals

today, as they were evoked in our cultural history, by the development of particular symbolic tools. If these

tools are not supported by appropriate educational activities, they will not be acquired in any adequate way,

and the forms of understanding they stimulate will not develop.

Education as the acquisition of intellectual tools is not some straightforward progressive scheme, but

rather is a process of gains and losses. That is, each kind of understanding, while ideally coalescing in

significant degree with previously acquired kinds, also suppresses something of the previous kinds. So, for

example, the elaborated literacy that produces Romantic understanding suppresses some elements of Mythic

understanding–we sense that there hath passed away a glory from the earth, as Wordsworth put it, when the

anaesthetizing power of literacy and theoretic thinking remove us a little from that early vivid participation

in the natural world.

The bottom line

In a pragmatic and empirically oriented culture, such as America's, it is sometimes hard to recognize

that what we do is determined in large part by what we think. If we think of education as the process of

socializing and academic achievement and individual fulfillment then we do particular things driven by these

ideas--supposing that we can recognize how best to achieve the ends we have in view. If the ideas we think

with are incompatible, then the practice that results is likely to be a shamble. I think our schools can fairly

be describes as a shamble of very varied activities, often heroically directed towards ends that are undercut

by other, often heroic, activities aimed at quite different ends.

Thinking about education as attaining the kinds of understanding developed in our evolution and

cultural history will incline us to do other things with schools. Instead of three discordant aims for

schooling, we will have a single coherent one. Anything that contributes to developing kinds of

understanding will have a place within such schools, and everything else will not. So the socializing, job-

preparation, arid learning, team sports, and so much else that are currently dumped into the school will have

to be dealt with by other social agencies. The education system might hope to become more like the health

system, in which each worker shares a single goal. At the moment it is more like, and rather worse than, the

prison system, which has the incompatible goals of punishing and rehabilitating–again, the more you do

one, the harder it is to do the other.

Schooling for understanding, when described at length*, doesn't require massive reorganization of

everything. In some sense it will be familiar, almost what we have meant by Education all along, but Plato

and Rousseau bewitched us with their rhetoric and the socializers bullied us with their urgent demands.

Education is a business of expanding understanding as much as we can manage for each student by enabling

them to acquire as fully as possible the range of symbolic tools that are products of our evolution and
cultural history. This is do-able, and there is good reason to believe that it will better satisfy the schools'

current paymasters than the doomed attempts to deliver three incompatible ends.

*As in my book, The Educated Mind: How Cognitive Tools shape our Understanding, Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1997.

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